About Maroons

It is more than a color.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains that the word came from the French maroon, also the Spanish cimarron. It referred to those considered wild or untamed, a derogatory colonial description of a runaway with the gall to choose life in the wild over slavery to crown and Christian god. The first Arawak encountered on the island Columbus called Hispaniola picked up and moved away from the smelly strangers who wanted them to work sunup to sunset for some great Queen who meant nothing to them. African slaves revolted in the Palomares area of Brazil and several Central American regions and then moved beyond the margin of "civilization" to live apart. Maroons were the forebears of Jamaican Rastafarians. Haile Selassie's--Ras Tafarai--visit to Jamaica in the 1940's generated the name Rasta, but the people who lived in the mountains of Jamaica had long before fought their way apart from the plantation slave system and remained such a scourge that they finally were offered a treaty by the English.

All of Mississippi north of Vicksburg was still swamp in the mid-1800's. Officially Choctaws had been removed by the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1835, though some remained behind illegally, disdaining treaty farms and wandering through the swamp from camp to camp as their ancestors had. Into this the Great Mississippi Swamp slipped runaway African slaves from downstate plantations.
As late as the 1930's, WPA oral historians made vivid references to black and other outlaw folk living inside that swamp.

Books in Delta libraries describe the swamp as the home of outlaws and runaways. Treaties with the Choctaw, Chickasaw and other tribes made provision for African Americans living in the wild with and sometimes enslaved by the tribes. Swamp throughout much of the South provided sanctuary for maroons. Only with respect to the Afro-Seminole and forts built by free blacks in Florida does very much research appear to have been done.

These black folk were not the first maroons in these United States because many of the indigenous people pushed off of the eastern seaboard by the first European colonists would have fit the description.

My research was done years ago, but the author is unaware that anyone has gone beyond Herbert Aptheker's work, "Maroons Within the Present Limits of the United States" from the "Journal of Negro History" 24:167-84 (1939). His article is re-printed in its entirety in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, R. Price, (2nd ed. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

Here are some of the items on the subject of Maroons in the Americas:
(taken from Maroon Societies)

--In the summer of 1526, five hundred Spaniards from Haiti settled with their slaves near the Pedee River in what would become South Carolina. But the Indians proved hostile, and many slaves ran away. Within the year, the colonists returned to Haiti leaving their "rebel Negroes with their Indian friends as the first permanent inhabitants, other than Native Americans, in what was to be the United States." Aptheker.

--In February of 1844, armed planters near Hanesville, Missis-sippi, set an ambush. They trapped six, wounded two and killed one of a gang of nearby maroons. Hanesville "Free Press", March 1, 1844, cited in "The Liberator", April 5, 1844.

--Near Bovina, Mississippi in March of 1857, a runaway cap was destroyed. Vicksburg "Whig", cited in "The Liberator", April 3, 1857.

--Near New Orleans, in June of 1836, "a band of runaway negroes in the Cypress Swamp ... had been committing depredations." Louisiana "Advertiser", June 8, 1836. The next year, the killing of a slave leader responsible for several deaths of white men was reported. New Orleans "Picayune", July 19, 1837.

--The war that commenced in 1837, that was called the Seminole War, was largely a slave retrieval operation to capture runaways from Georgia planters who had escaped to live with the Seminole. It lasted until 1843 and cost European Americans $20 million and the deaths of 1,500 soldiers. Indian Removal, Grant Foreman (1832).

--In 1832 a Colonel Hatch reported that some "500 Union men, deserters and negroes were ... raiding towards Gainesville [ Florida]". Disloyalty in the Confederacy, G. L. Tatum (Chapel Hill 1934)

Living in inaccessible places was the price of freedom. On this historical reality for African Americans, who will continue the research?

PBS.org - Maroons